FAILURE at cultivating habits

Due to the addition of a morning standup at work, I noticed I was getting in much later than I thought. I could previously pass off some pretty egregious arrival times as “a one time thing” to myself, but not when a hard deadline made it clear that this was happening multiple times a week. So I tried harder to get in earlier, and this made basically no impact.

I noticed I was spending a lot of time watching video game streaming; Twitch streams are long, regularly 4 hours, which would just vaporize an evening or an afternoon. It’s not so much that it was a ton of total time, but it was basically a monolithic chunk of time that wasn’t amenable to being split up to allow something to get done each day. I love you beaglerush, but the streams are just too damn long, so I decided I should stop watching game streams. However, I just felt tired and amenable to bending the rules at approximately the same rate as before, so my behavior didn’t really change.

I’m a night owl, to the extent that going to sleep between midnight and 3 AM probably covers 95% of my sleeping times, and the rest is heavily skewed towards after 3 AM. So I started tracking when I went to sleep, and had some friends apply social demerits when I went to sleep late. I got mildly better, but was still all over the place with my sleep schedule.

There’s a happy-ish ending for these habits, but first…

FAILURE at meeting goals

A year ago, I decided to have some resolutions. However, I didn’t want them to be year-long resolutions: a year is a long fucking time, and I knew I’d be pretty susceptible to…

falling off the wagon and then not getting back on, burning the rest of the year, or

mis-estimating how big a year-sized task would be, which would probably only become apparent near the middle of the year. If I got it really wrong, it would be months before I could properly try again.

So similarly to my newsletter tiers, I decided to break the year into fifths (quinters?), and resolved to do something for each of those. I hoped it would be long enough to actually get something done, while being short enough that I could iterate quickly.

So, how did I do?

Quinter 1

FAILURE. Finish the hardware part of project noisEE. Design turned out to be hard, did a design Hail Mary that required parts that didn’t get here before the end of the quinter.

Stretch FAILURE. Read all of Jaynes’ Probability Theory. Got only ~40% of the way through: it turns out trying to replicate all the proofs in a textbook is pretty hard.

FAILURE. Try to do more city exploratory activities. Planning and executing fun/interesting activities was more time consuming than anticipated, and I didn’t account for how much homebody inertia I harbored and how time consuming the other goals would be.

SUCCESS. Keep up all pre-existing habits.

Quinter 2

FAILURE. Finish project noisEE. It turns out the Hail Mary design was broken, who could have guessed?

SUCCESS. Keep up all pre-existing habits. Apparently attaining this goal isn’t a problem, so I stopped keeping track of this in future quinters.

Quinter 3

SUCCESS/FAILURE. Finish project noisEE, or know what went wrong while finishing. There was a problem with the 2nd Hail Mary, which I debugged and figured out, but it was expensive to fix, so I didn’t stretch to actually fix it. However, the next quinter I didn’t respect the timebox, which was the entire point of this timebox[1].

FAILURE. Make a feedback widget for meetups. After designing it, I discovered I didn’t want to spend the money to fabricate the feasible “worse is better” solution.

SUCCESS. Spend 20 hours on learning how to Live Forever. Spent 30+ hours on research.

Quinter 4

It’s about this time that I start enforcing goal ordering: instead of doing the easiest/most fun thing first, I would try to finish goals in order, so large and time consuming tasks don’t get pushed to the end of the quinter.

SUCCESS. Finish ingesting in-progress Live Forever research. Just wanted to make sure momentum continued from the previous quinter so I would actually finish covering all the main points I discovered I wanted to include.

SUCCESS (sad). Fix project noisEE, or give up after 4 hours. I gave up after 4 hours, after trying out some hacks.

SUCCESS. Write up noisEE project notes. Surprisingly, I had things to say despite not actually finishing the project, making the notes into a mistakes post.

FAILURE. Write up feedback widget design for others to follow. For some reason, I ignored my reluctance to actually build the thing and assumed I would value writing out potentially building the thing instead. Talk about a total loss of motivation.

Stretch FAILURE. Prep the meta-analysis checklist. Didn’t have time or the necessary knowledge.

Quinter 5

At this point, I’m starting to feel stretched out, so I started building in break times into my goal structure.

SUCCESS. Prepare to present the Live Forever research. Was probably too conservative here, I also planned to actually present, and there weren’t foreseeable things that would have prevented it from happening.

FAILURE. Take a week off project/goal work. I thought I would have only 1 week to prepare to present, but it turned into 2-3 weeks and broke up this break week, which was not nearly as satisfying.

SUCCESS. Take 1 week off at the end of the year. That’s when I’m writing this post!

Miscellaneous FAILURE

There’s so much FAILURE, I need a miscellaneous category.

Speaking of categories, I was organizing a category theory reading group for the first third of 2017 based on Bartosz’s lectures, but eventually the abstractions on abstractions got to be too much[5] and everything else in life piled on, and we ended up doing only sporadic meetups where we sat around confused before I decided to kill the project. In the end, we FAILED to reach functional programming enlightenment.

I’ve even started to FAIL at digesting lactose. It’s super sad, because I love cheese.

Why was there so much FAILURE this year?

Part of it is that I had more things to FAIL at. For example, I wouldn’t previously keep track of how I was doing at my habits, and color code them so I could just look at my tracker and say “huh, there’s more red than usual”. Or, I wouldn’t previously have the data to say “huh, I went to sleep after 3AM 2 weeks in a row”[6].

And in a way, I eventually succeeded: for each of the habits I listed earlier, I applied the club of Beeminder and hit myself until I started Doing The Thing. Does my reliance on an extrinsic tool like Beeminder constitute a moral failing? Maybe, but the end results are exactly what I wanted:

I got super motivated to build up a safety buffer to get into work early (even before getting my sleep schedule together!),

immediately went from an average sleeping time of 2AM to almost exactly 12:29[8].

And for goals, I opened myself up to FAILURE by actually making fine-grained goals, which meant estimating what I could do, and tracking whether I actually did them. In a way, there are two ways to FAIL: I could overestimate my abilities, or I could simply make mistakes and FAIL to finish what I otherwise would have been able to do. In practice, it seems like I tended to FAIL by overestimating myself.

It’s pretty obvious in retrospect: I started out by FAILING at everything, and then started cutting down my expectations and biting off smaller and smaller chunks until I actually hit my goals. Maybe I should have built up instead of cutting down, but I wanted to feel badass, and apparently the only way you can do that is by jumping in the deep end, so FAILING over and over it is. On the other hand, I think I just got lucky that I stuck it out until I got it together and started hitting my targets, so if you can do it by building upwards, that might work better.

Takeaways

So going forward what are the things I’d keep in mind when trying to hit goals?

Think through more details when planning. Saying “I will do all the proofs in Probability Theory” is fine and good, but there’s only so much time, and if you haven’t worked even one of the proofs, then it’s not a goal, it’s a hope and a prayer. Get some Fermi estimates in there, think about how long things will take and what could go wrong (looking at you, hardware turn-around times[9]).

If you’ve never done a similar thing before, then estimating the effort to hit a certain goal is going to be wildly uncertain. Pare the goal way down, because there are probably failure modes you’re not even aware of. For example, “lose 5 pounds” would be a good goal for me, because I’ve fiddled with the relevant knobs before and have an idea about what works. “Make a coat from scratch” is a black box to me, hence not a good goal. Instead, I might instead aim for “find all the tough parts of making a coat from scratch”, which is more specific, more amenable to different approaches, and doesn’t set up the expectation of some end product that is actually usable[10].

Relatedly, 10 weeks (about the length of a quinter) is not a leisurely long time. Things need to be small enough to actually fit, preferably small enough to do in a sprint near the end of the quinter. I know crunch time is a bad habit carried over from my academic years, but old habits die hard, and at least the things get done.

Build in some rest. I pulled some ludicrous hours in the beginning of the year, and noticed as time went on that I seemed less able to put in a solid 16 hours of math-working on the weekends. My current best guess is that I haven’t been taking off enough time from trying to Do The Thing, so I’m building in some break times.

Don’t throw away time. You’ll notice that I kept the noisEE dream alive for 4 quinters, each time trying tweaks and hacks to make it work. It’s clear now that this is a classic example of the sunk cost fallacy, and that I either should have spent more time at the beginning doing it right, or just letting it go at that point.

Another way to throw away time is to try and do things you don’t want to do. My example is trying to make/post the feedback widget, which is pretty simple, but I discovered I couldn’t give any shits about it after the design phase. This isn’t great, because I said I wanted to do the thing, and not doing the thing means you’re breaking the habit of doing the things you’ve set out to do (from Superhuman by Habit). Unfortunately, I’m still not sure how to distinguish when you really want to do something versus when an easily overridden part of yourself thinks it’s virtuous to want to do something, which is much less motivating.

Goal hacks might be useful. Looking at it, the main hack I used was timeboxes, which worked sometimes (total longevity research was within a 2x order of magnitude of my timebox estimate) and not so well in others (noisEE overflowed). It seems to be most useful when I’m uncertain how much actual work needs to be done to achieve some goal, but I still want to make sure work happens on it. After working on it for some number of hours, it should be clearer how sizable the task is and it can get a more concrete milestone in the next round.

Stretch goals might also work, but making things stretch goals seems like a symptom of unwanted uncertainty, and tend to be sized such that they never actually get hit. Unless I find myself stagnating, I plan on just dropping stretch goals as a tool.

If you’re not doing the thing because of something low-level like procrastination, a bigger stick to beat yourself with might help. Beeminder is my stick of choice, with the caveat that you need to be able to be honest with yourself, and excessive failure might just make you sad, instead of productive.

(As a counterpoint, you might be interested in non-coercive ways to motivate yourself, in which case you might check out Malcolm Ocean’s blog.)

Despite all the FAILURE, I think agree with the sentiment of Ray’s post: over the past few years, I’ve started getting my shit together, building the ability to do things that are more complicated than a single-weekend project and the agency to pursue them.

That said, most of the things I finished this year are somewhat ancillary, laying the groundwork for future projects and figuring out what systems work for me. Now that I’ve finished a year testing those systems and have some experience using them, maybe next year I can go faster, better, stronger. Not harder, though, that’s how you burn out.

Well, here’s to 2018: maybe the stage I set this year will have a proper play in the next.

[1] ↑ Thinking about it, timeboxes fall into two uses. You either want to make a daunting task more tractable, so you commit to only doing a small timebox, and if you want to keep going then that’s great! However, the other timebox is used to make sure that some task that would otherwise grow without bound stays bounded. I intended for the noisEE timebox to be used in the bound fashion, so when I kept deciding to keep working on it, that meant the timebox was broken.

[2] ↑ This project does not have a post yet, and may never have one. Hold your horses.

[3] ↑ Offsite backups are an important part of your digital hygiene, and the Butt is the perfect place to put your them.